I am unable to see the co-operative men because I am
unwell. My speech in which I tell about this ailment is to
be published
tomorrow.[1]
About the co-operative men. I fear
that they may have fictitiously blown up their liabilities
when handing them over to you. I am passing your memo
on to Gorbunov and Smolyaninov, and request you to send
also to them the final exact calculation of the assets and
liabilities, to enable them, to tell me the results.

How are things with the loan which you were expecting
before your departure, from the co-operative societies
abroad?

I shall be expecting short reports from you about the
development of the co-operative apparatus in Russia (I have
only the old figures: September—1 million, October—3,
November—6 million gold rubles). Do you now have the
10-day figures? Are there any precise data on how many
gubernia societies have and have not been submitting
correct reports to you? Do you apply the remuneration of
co-operative workers depending on the volume of their
turnover and the success achieved, and expressed in a
reduction of the percentage cost of our apparatus?

Please reply as briefly as possible to these questions and
inform me in addition about any serious measures the
Centrosoyuz Board has taken to see that our co-operative
establishment is truly a commercial and not a bureaucratic
organ. Tikhomirov’s letter, which I received a short time
ago and to which I have
replied,[2]
produced quite a few
doubts in my mind on this score, just as did the attempt
to publish a weekly newspaper called Kooperativnoye
Dyelo.[3]
It looks as if you have bureaucrats and intellectuals
sitting in unduly high places, who are capable of carrying
on a paper and a newspaper game, but are incapable of
trading.

[4]This is in reply to a letter from L. M. Khinchuk, Chairman of
the Centrosoyuz Board, of March 7, 1922. Khinchuk wrote that
the co-operative delegation, consisting of the representatives of
the International Co-operative Society, members of the British
Co-operative Wholesale Society and representatives of the French
and Czechoslovak co-operative societies, which had arrived in
Soviet Russia at the invitation of Centrosoyuz, was asking Lenin
to receive it. Khinchuk also said that an agreement had been
reached with the old Russian co-operators living abroad, who had
handed over to Centrosoyuz their valuables and apparatus in
Western Europe and America and declared that they were no
longer representatives of Russian co-operative societies abroad.
“This,” Khinchuk wrote, “was in fact the beginning of our
recognition abroad.” He gave a list of the valuables handed over
(Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of
the C.P.S.U. Central Committee).